Hanna is a frustratingly inconsistent film. Part fairy tale, part campy Bourne Identity, part Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, its unevenly paced and every single actor is forced into some inexplicably unwieldy accent or other. It’s about super-kids, if that’s not giving away too much of the plot, and it felt to me a bit uncomfortable, like watching child abuse. Saoirse Ronan is good though, I’ll give her that (though like The Child, I kept wanting to tell her to tie her hair back). Olivia Williams is in it too, so there’s a bit of proper elocution, finally.
And I’m delighted to say that the locations are one of the best thing in the entire film. One of the earlier locations used is the severe, concrete site of the Berlin Windkanal – the Nazis’ aerodynamic testing windtunnel – a site that appeared in ons eie Charlize’s Aeon Flux (and was in turn the movie location that started me on the road to writing this blog.) The other-worldly abandoned amusement park is an actual site in the former East Germany called Spree Park; the owners shipped all the funfair rides off to Peru (honest) and ended up as cocaine smugglers. You can’t make this up. They left the dinosaurs and mammoths behind to slowly decay, like some post-apocalyptic Creation Museum in Boondocks, Kentucky.